#also. you CANNOT talk about prestige tv without talking about it’s history of being targeted to middle class white men

[tomwambsmilk]

There’s probably a whole broader conversation to be had about TV in particular as a medium that has been so thoroughly shaped by capitalism bc the scale of the distribution technology has relegated it to major studio networks (at least prior to the advent of YouTube, and even that’s so young there still isn’t an indie tv world of the same scale as the indie film world). And also bc TV networks are predominantly advertiser funded, which means shows for most of television history were handpicked to appeal to the demos advertisers were trying to reach (which for much of TV history was middle class white women, because the assumption was those women controlled household spending and had the most disposable income). HBO had a radical impact on TV history because it was subscription funded rather than ad funded, and pulled most of those subscribers by trying to appeal to demos which the TV networks neglected, which means it had more creative freedom. But even so, in order to fund its work which was more artistically driven it relied (at least in the early days) on the creation of R-rated, gratuitous shocker television to bring in subscribers who were dissatisfied with network TV (mostly middle class white men).

But so much of how we understand and analyze television is rooted in that history of it predominantly being a vehicle for advertising, something that really only began to change once we entered the “Prestige TV era” of the late 90s and early 2000s and more cable network shows began to achieve commercial dominance and artistic acclaim. And so with TV more than any other art form I think there’s a real sense of “TV should be catered to my personal interests and desires rather than pursuing any sort of broader message or more ambitious storytelling” that’s a) somewhat unconscious and b) still to a certain extent supported by advertiser-funded network TV, and it can make discussion and analysis of TV difficult. Because the truth is what makes a good network TV show is fundamentally different from what makes a good cable TV show, because the medium is the message, and also because the intent for a TV show is always to maximize a studio’s profitability, and that looks different in different mediums.

(And on top of that - the fact that there’s no indie TV community means there isn’t the kind of influence on the studios that the indie film community has on film studios. There’s no indie-TV-creator-to-studio-TV-creator pipeline, and TV creators tend to be pulled from a very small circle of ‘pedigreed’ industry names.)